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DanDrollette writes:
One way to help eliminate carbon emissions and thereby fight global warming may be to exploit fusion, the energy source of the sun and stars.
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DanDrollette writes:
The secret history of the world’s largest nuclear detonation is coming to light after 60 years. The United States dismissed the gigantic Tsar Bomba as a stunt, but behind the scenes was working to build a “superbomb” of its own.
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DanDrollette writes:
This really, genuinely could mark a sea change for renewables in the United States.
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DanDrollette writes:
A comprehensive look at the US' new (and expensive, unnecessary, and highly vulnerable) land-based nuclear missile. Many of the missile’s critics are former military leaders, and their criticism has to do with its immovable silos. Relative to nuclear missiles on submarines, which can slink around undetected, or nuclear bombs on airplanes—the two other legs of the nuclear "triad"—America’s land-based nuclear missiles are easy marks.
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DanDrollette writes:
The anniversay of the bombing of Nagasaki just occured, so this is is a good time to revisit events of the lesser-known of the two atomic bombings.
In a nutshell: A typhoon was coming, the fuel pump failed, they had to switch planes, things were wired incorrectly, they missed their rendezvous, they couldn't see the primary target, they ran out of gas on the way home, and they had to crash-land. But the worst part was when the Fat Man atomic bomb started to arm itself and begin the countdown to detonation mid-flight, before they were even half-way to Nagasaki.
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DanDrollette writes:
Ten years ago, author David Quammen interviewed scientists about the possibility of a new pandemic. Their prediction: there would indeed be a new disease, likely from the coronavirus family, coming out of a bat, and it would happen in or around a wet market in China.
But what was not predictable was how unprepared we would be.
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Lasrick writes:
12 years (and billions of rubles) after skirmishes between pro-Russian separatists and government forces in Georgia and the subsequent invasion of the former Soviet republic by Russian forces, Russia has heeded the lessons learned from that conflict: The Russian military had gone to war in using World War II-era compasses for navigation and outmoded equipment for weapons targeting, a far cry from the capabilities of the US military. But Russia is now challenging the United States’ long-standing supremacy in space, working to exploit the US military’s dependence on space systems for communications, navigation, intelligence, and targeting.
Aaron Bateman of Johns Hopkins, a former US Air Force intelligence officer who has published on technology and military strategy, Cold War history, and European security affairs, writes about a coming space arms race, with Moscow’s aggressive behavior in space potentially inducing the United States to pursue more assertive policies, like the reinvigoration of Cold War-era anti-satellite weapons programs.
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Dan Drollette writes:
We absolutely, positively, must tackle climate change speedily. Or as the authors of this article put it: "By 'speed,' we mean measures—including regulatory ones—that can begin within two-to-three years, be substantially implemented in five-to-10 years, and produce a climate response within the next decade or two." (Quick aside: one of the authors, Mario Molina, won the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1995, for his work on holes in the ozone layer.)
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Dan Drollette writes:
The incident should serve as yet another wake-up call that the nuclear power industry needs to take cybersecurity more seriously.
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Dan Drollette writes:
Opponents of wind power claim that it's too unreliable, intermittent, unpredictable, and expensive to ever be a major energy source. But on Block Island, Rhode Island — site of North America's first commercial, offshore wind farm — residents found the exact opposite to be true. The Bulletin goes to the smallest town in the smallest state to find out why, in this multimedia package.
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Dan Drollette writes:
A little-publicized $7 billion federal agency is key to defending the country from a biological attack. Its operators have to prepare for the unthinkable, such as what to do if 100,000 cases of some new disease with pandemic potential appears—what global health officials have sometimes dubbed “Disease X.”
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Dan Drollette writes:
A specialist in nuclear security analyzes Game of Thones. One immediate similarity to the concept of Mutual Assured Destruction: The inherent difficulties of managing fictional dragons and real-life nuclear weapons. (Which George R.R. Martin was well-aware of.)
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Lasrick writes:
A court ruling on whether bots have First Amendment free speech rights remains in the realm of conjecture, but as a new law in California will soon force bots that engage in electioneering or marketing to declare their non-human identity, it may be coming soon. Laurent Sacharoff, a law professor at the University of Arkansas, thinks the people programming bots may want US courts to answer the question on free speech rights for bots in the affirmative. Take a hypothetical bot that engages a voter around a shared concern like motherhood, for instance. "If it has to say, ‘Well look, I’m not really a mother, I’m a chatbot mother, a mother of other chatbots. And when I say I feel your pain, I don’t actually have feelings.’ That’s just not going to be very effective,” Sacharoff says.
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Dan Drollette writes:
Dire as it is, the latest IPCC report is actually too optimistic — it ignores the risk of self-reinforcing climate feedbacks pushing the planet into chaos beyond human control. So says a team of climate experts, including the winner of the 1995 Nobel for his work on depletion of the ozone layer.
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meckdevil writes:
Joanne Chory, director of the Plant Molecular and Cellular Biology laboratory at the Salk Institute for Biological Sciences and a Breakthrough Prize recipient, has created an initiative called “Harnessing Plants for the Future” to develop a super plant that will both provide food and store carbon dioxide in its roots. A “super chickpea plant” now in development could remove huge amounts of excess atmospheric carbon dioxide and fix it in the soil, greatly diminishing the impacts of climate change (not to mention producing large amounts of tasty hummus). But fear of anti-GMO activists has so far deterred her from using the Crispr gene-editing tool to speed work on the plant.
